


driftwood bones and seafoam hearts

by Sanamun



Series: Seaglass [1]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: AU where everything's the same except Annie is a trans woman, Annie Cresta-Centric, Character Study, District 4, F/M, Gratuitous ocean metaphors, Implied/Referenced Forced Prostitution, Mental Health Issues, Psychosis, Trans Annie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4318035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanamun/pseuds/Sanamun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a girl who they had once called a boy and who is really only seaglass.</p><p>Character study of a trans!Annie, the ways in which she is and is not the 'mad girl', and what her and Finnick are to eachother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	driftwood bones and seafoam hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the song "running to the sea" by Röyksopp & Susanne Sundfør. The Hunger Games trans!AU you didn't know you wanted! (and in fact probably do not actually want.)

There is a girl who they had once called a boy and who is really only seaglass; strange and reshaped by the waves but never broken, not like some of them. Annie Cresta was not a shell when they pulled her out of the arena, not like the ones that cover the shores of Four or Johanna Mason with her dead eyes and dead family and dead heart and soul.

Annie wonders if that's how Finnick feels, sometimes; like a seashell. Something beautiful and long since empty. She hopes not, because someone always breaks shells entirely in the end, crushes them beneath their feet like driftwood and dead leaves and the tributes in her arena who couldn't swim fast enough to make it out alive.

Besides, Annie Cresta collects shells, and she will never let herself become just one more person who owns Finnick.

They are driftwood bones and seafoam hearts; the poor, mad girl and the beautiful boy with the trident. They are the sea, and they belong to nobody.

Annie sees things that other people can't, so they call her crazy, but she thinks they just aren't paying the right sort of attention. They say a lot of things in Panem, but that doesn't make them true, Annie knows.

She saw herself in Ayden and she sees the boy Finnick once was in the creature the Capitol forced him to become, and she sees jellyfish that float through the air on currents all their own and the shadowed ghosts of every soul Four's seas have ever drowned, but it isn't until her Games that Annie learns she can make the shadows dance.

(And she dances with them, too, little mad Annie Cresta with her seashells and soft songs and stories, lost at the bottom of an ocean she created. Its better there.)

They call her mad and maybe she is, at that, but there are much worse things to be. Annie knows that, too.

Even Finnick does it once, “You’re mad, Annie Cresta”, said like he wasn’t drowning, too, and she just laughs against his too-perfect lips like she knows a secret he doesn’t, which is as true as anything else in their world, in its own way.

She pulls him with her into the waves, because tomorrow he will be their plaything, but tonight belongs to the mad girl and to the sea, and nobody is watching but the moon and the fish and the gulls and all the drowned ghosts of Four.

(The ocean, Annie Cresta tells him once, only ever swallows it’s lovers.)

“Be safe, Finnick Odair,” she says when he leaves, and he makes no promises, and she wants to hate him for it as much as she wants to hate the Capitol with all their falsely flickering lights and candy-bright colours and smiles like sharks with too many teeth, but Annie Cresta is a poor, mad girl who can change nothing, and it isn’t worth the energy, and when the ocean breeze calls her name she follows it down to the shoreline, to greet her old companions of starfish and jellies and sea monsters. The sea is bigger than the Capitol, and if she wills it hard enough it can return Finnick to her and nobody will ever touch him again, but even Annie isn’t truly mad enough to believe that.

He will be back, though, he always is; with new shadows under his sea-green eyes and the ghosts of old bruises covering his sun-browned skin. They never let him keep the marks; maybe it makes them feel guilty knowing they do what they do to a person and not some empty-headed doll they carved from whalebone and shells.

They take him away when they’re done and they make him pretty again, and Annie traces the lines of scars that aren’t there, invisible damage that she can see but nobody else can, like always. Annie’s scars were always obvious, even before the games, standing out white and silver against the brown of her skin, but she is a poor, mad girl and nobody needs her to be beautiful.

He wasn’t her first, when they found eachother under the pier the year after his games, all seawater soaked skin and careless laughter giving over to touches they don’t have to think about, so unlike the Capitol and their insistence that Finnick isn’t allowed to be anything less than perfect. He wasn’t her first. She doesn’t think even he knows that. The boy who had been, whose name Annie Cresta does not care to remember, had called her by a name not her own and she had slipped out of his arms as soon as he was done, falling backwards into the sea before he could catch her.

(Under the water, where she couldn’t be followed, the child who would one day be Annie Cresta had wondered why she didn’t feel any different; why she couldn’t feel anything for him, and for the first and last time in her life Annie Cresta was as empty as her shells, until she replaced the hollows of her bones with starfish and coral.)

Ayden Cresta was the name called when Annie is reaped, and for a second she doesn’t even recognize it as her own. Her stylist takes her long hair and her seaglass jewellry, because he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand at all. They dress her up as a boy and parade him (her) in front of the cameras and the capitol. 

“You’re being such a good boy”, one of her prep team whispers in her ear before her tribute interview, and there are too many hands on her making her into someone else, “They’ll love you. Just don’t tell them that your name is Annie and you can talk to the sea.” 

(And Annie thinks but does not say, but that’s all I am.)

And Ayden/Annie Cresta wins her games when the dam breaks and nobody else can swim for long enough. Everyone knows that. She was never the same afterwards; everyone knows that, too.

What they tend to forget is exactly what was said on her victory tour, “Stop calling me that! My name is Annie!”

They pulled her out of the arena singing to herself in a child’s voice, and sometimes she laughs at nothing and stares at things that aren’t really there, and that makes it easy to brush aside her comment as just another symptom of her strangeness. Don’t listen, he’s mad, everyone knows that. It means nothing.

All in all, Annie’s tour is one of the most disastrous in recent memory, at least until the star-crossed lovers of Twelve come along and steal that crown from her, but it proves something: 

What was left of Ayden drowned in that flooded arena, and Annie Cresta, the mad girl of district Four, will never be anyone else again.

They never force her into capitol beds the way they did Finnick; she isn’t sure why, because they don’t want to be so close to a creature like her or because there’s nothing to hold against her, either would be enough. She listens to the waves and the wind and the whispers in the back of her head and she wishes Finnick had been that lucky.

Mags understands, Mags and her wife in all but name and the small army of children they invite into their shared home, but she tells Annie the capitol never will. She’s not sure if Finnick does, anymore. He never used to question it, but after her games he never seems to want to touch her. Maybe it was Ayden he wanted all along, Annie thinks. Maybe he was just humouring the mad girl in her fantasy of the week.

(She doesn’t understand, back then, that Finnick has a thousand reasons for not touching her, but none of them are that.)

She doesn’t screen-test well, and she’s not considered stable enough to be a mentor, so they leave Annie alone. There’s nothing left in her that they want. She’s expendable, but Finnick will walk back into his own personal hell and allow strangers to cut him open and rearrange his insides for fun like so many fish back in Four, time and again, to prevent them from acting on that. 

The fish tell her to be grateful for that, but she isn’t, because as mad Annie Cresta sits under the pier where her and Finnick Odair first met, shaking from silent tears, she can hear Finnick leading his latest capitol client to ‘somewhere more private’ with a seductive purr to his voice that she knows better than most is faked, and she can hear the giggle that follows that statement and the moans that come later, and she can see another week where Finnick tries to hide the bruises before the capitol takes them away from him again and refuses to touch her, and she wishes the sea would drown them all.

In another life, Annie is Ayden and he’s not mad, and after he wins his games him and Finnick face the capitol together, or Ayden had always been Annie and was reaped the same year as her beautiful boy with his eyes like the sea, and they had been Katniss and Peeta instead, or maybe they both die in their arenas, just two more lost souls, two more dead kids breathing in coral and starfish and saltwater, two more ghosts in a world that (Annie Cresta knows) already has too many.

There are a lot of worlds that could have been, and they float behind her eyes like pebbles in the tide, but none of them are this world (as much as Annie Cresta has ever lived in this world), and the sea pulls them back away from Annie, dragged out on a wave before she can catch them.

In this world, though, in this life Finnick Odair is beautiful and funny and kind and used and tossed aside like he’s nothing, and Annie Cresta is the poor mad girl who cannot stop it, and he is drowning and she is lost at sea, and when they kiss it tastes of saltwater and regret, and by the time the revolution comes they are both too far gone to be saved.

And the mad girl who was made of seaglass takes the hand of her beautiful, broken boy and leads him down to the shoreline, and the water and the fish whisper to her as the waves crash over them both.


End file.
